UC Berkeley

In this work, we investigate the characteristics of the electric current in the so-called symmetric Anderson impurity model. We study the nonequilibrium model using two complementary approximate methods, the perturbative quantum master equation approach to the reduced density matrix and a self-consistent equation of motion approach to the nonequilibrium Green's function. We find that, at a particular symmetry point, an interacting Anderson impurity model recovers the same steady-state current as an equivalent noninteracting model, akin a two-band resonant level model. We show this in the Coulomb blockade regime for both high and low temperatures, where either the approximate master equation approach or the Green's function method provides accurate results for the current. We conclude that the steady-state current in the symmetric Anderson model at this regime does not encode characteristics of a many-body interacting system.